“Okay,” Nellie said, “whatever you men gotta do, you gotta do. I don’t understand it, but I know I’d be missing you if you ever took off.”
We kissed—the sensation was as sweet as ever, never losing its thrill—and I left her trying to reckon how we could go through six dozen eggs so fast serving only twenty-four separate breakfasts.
I prowled around the grounds for a while, trying to walk off my nerves. We hadn’t had any new arrivals in the past twenty-four hours, and I was pretty sure none of the older renters were spies from Nancarrow. So that meant his boys had yet to show up. What was keeping them?
All our workers bustled industriously about, grateful for their jobs. The lake had quite a few swimmers of all ages, enjoying the unseasonably hot weather. Although the lodge had no dock yet, we had bought two used skiffs that could be beached on the sand. Anglers had both of them rented for the afternoon.
Forgetting for the moment the deceitful nature of this enterprise, I felt a surge of pride at the way the business had taken off. But the emotion only left me feeling worse because it was all a house of cards, a Potemkin village.
I decided to look in on Ray and make sure he was on task. But on the grass outside the room he shared with Vee, I encountered a startling sight.
There, reclining on a lawn chair, was a woman I didn’t recognize at first. It took me a moment to register that it was Vee, in her role as Mata Hari.
She had ditched the usual drab blouse and loose linen pants in favor of denim short shorts that revealed long, lovely legs. She wore gold sandals that laced up her calves, and a men’s shirt tied off to exhibit her taut stomach, and unbuttoned enough to reveal a rim of lacy bra. She had put her hair up, and her makeup conveyed a wanton sophistication. The designer sunglasses added an air of inscrutability.
I couldn’t see where she might be carrying the blade, but I wasn’t willing to bet she had left it in the room.
I stopped beside her chair. Maybe my jaw hung open a little as I began to feel aroused all over again.
Even her voice had changed. No longer indifferent or harsh, now it dripped with a juicy indolence. “Did you want something, Mr. McClinton? I believe my rent’s paid up for the next week.”
“Holy Christ, Vee.”
She reached up and tilted her sunglasses down. Her face suddenly lost the sultry tramp look and reverted to her standard mask of aloof stoicism. The contrast with the rest of her appearance was unsettling.
“Motivation can work wonders, Glen. Ask any actress. When you want something bad enough, you figure out how to get it.” The sunglasses went back into place, and the new personality kicked seamlessly back in. “Please be sure to let me know if I can do you again—I mean, do anything for you again—Mr. McClinton.”
I turned away, forgetting I had intended to check on Ray. And that’s when I saw a black Cadillac Escalade come up the drive.
33
The big SUV pulled into an empty spot in the gravel lot. The doors opened, and two men got out. White thug Buck Rushlow and black thug Needles Digweed, each in boots and camo and looking like a linebacker with a chip on his shoulder.
I began to miss Stan a great deal.
My stomach felt heavy, the way it had the day I first saw Sheriff Broadstairs from across the lawn. But along with the sense of dread, this time I felt a kind of pleasurable excitement—exaltation, even.
All the waiting and preparation was finally over. Win or lose, the game was afoot. At the end, we’d be rich, or … I couldn’t bring myself to guess. Alive, I hoped, even if stone busted. But the potential thrill of skinning these morons, of helping Stan and Vee pull off their big get-even, revived the glee I had felt when reeling in yet another sucker of a client back in my lawyering days. Their money was about to become mine, and they were actually stupid enough to have bought my spiel and practically forced their dough on me of their own accord. All I ever had to do was ask for it with innocent enthusiasm.
So as I walked over to the new arrivals, I put a bounce in my step and a broad innkeeper’s smile on my yokel’s face. Nothing too overdone, just a faintly dimwitted hospitality and eagerness for their patronage. I could feel myself believing the reality of my guise, inhabiting the role fully: the key to any successful con. I would soon show Vee she wasn’t the only method actor around here.
“Howdy!” I said. “Welcome to the Bigelow Junction Motor Lodge. My name’s Glen McClinton, and I own this place. Beautiful day, isn’t it? Hope you had a pleasant drive, wherever you hail from. You fellows looking to stay with us, I hope?”
Both men wore sunglasses, which made them a little hard to read. Buck Rushlow’s thick wheat-straw hair covered a bucket-shaped head with features spaced a little too far apart. Needles Digweed sported tight, short cornrows, scraggly facial hair, and an astonishingly artificial-looking nose that surely had seen serious plastic surgery after a run-in with a razor, broken bottle, or length of rebar.
Digweed said, “Yeah, boss, that’s why we’re here. Aim to get us in a little huntin’.” He opened the rear hatch on the Escalade, and I saw two black fabric rifle or shotgun cases, along with camp stools, blaze-orange jackets, tree stands, and a tarp.
The sight of the guns amped up my unease, but I didn’t let it show. After all, hunters were supposedly part of our bread and butter.
“Well, sir, we own five hundred acres, and there’s no hunting on lodge grounds, of course. But everything after that’s national forest, and long as you got your license, you’re good to go. Just have to be careful of the locals, and maybe a few hikers. Any land that’s not posted, you can assume you’re good. People in these parts understand hunting. Now, the season at the moment is only on for turkeys, geese, and deer. You’re a little early for bear or moose.”
“That’s fine,” said Rushlow. “We’re not fussy, long’s we get to shoot something.”
I had to interpret that comment innocently, of course. There could be no hint of suspicion that I knew who they were and why they were here.
Both men had a perceptible but not overwhelming south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line accent. I had supposed that Barnaby Nancarrow would hire locals, former or current, from the Gulch, just as he had with Stan Hasso, out of childhood loyalties and pride in having transcended his roots and appearing as a patron to his left-behind homeboys. Then again, maybe hiring out-of-towners made more sense. No conflicts of interest with relatives, their records unknown to the authorities (at least initially), greater dispassion when it came to breaking legs and busting heads, and so forth. Nancarrow had probably used his connections to import these goons from Atlanta or the Carolinas.
“All right, then, sounds like you fellows are primed for some fun. I assume you got your licenses in order? Local sheriff’s kind of a hardnose about rules and regs.”
I was giving the dodgy Broadstairs more credit for dutifulness than he deserved, but they couldn’t realize that.
“Right here,” said Digweed, patting one of his many pockets.
“Fine, fine! Let’s get you settled in, then. We have two rooms open. You each need one?”
I tried to put all the expected local businessman’s greed into the question, and was rewarded by seeing Rushlow and Digweed exchange a look that plainly said, What the hell kind of suckers does he take us for?
“No thanks, we’ll manage with one,” said Rushlow. “Long’s it’s got double beds. Won’t be spending much time in the room, anyhow.”
“Think you’ll be here a week or so? I can give you a special rate.”
“Naw, just a couple of days. This is kind of a sneaky short vacation. Gotta get back to work soon.”
Rushlow was lifting the gun cases from the back of the SUV.
“Here, let me give you a hand with those,” I said. “I can get one of our staff to carry any other bags.”
Rushlow hesitated a moment, then handed the guns over to me. “Thanks
. We’ll unload the rest of our stuff later.”
The alien weight of the rifles felt disturbing. I shuffled them awkwardly before I could get a grip on the handles, and began leading the way to the office.
Of course, I made certain to pass as close as possible to the sunbathing Vee.
“Your room’s down this end of the building. Just take a gander before we register you, to see if it’s to your liking.”
The two hoods were so poleaxed by Vee, they would have made happy noises if I had shown them two cots on a compost heap in the middle of a junkyard.
Looking over the top of her shade at the admiring newcomers, Vee lifted her cocktail and proceeded to turn the simple act of drinking through a straw into an obscene performance illegal in several of the more conservative states.
“Gee, Mr. McClinton, you shouldn’t ought to sneak up on a girl that way. What if I had been on my tummy with my top down? I could’ve gotten spooked and jumped right up!”
That mental image left both me and the new guests a little light-headed. They leered wordlessly at Vee, who accepted their horndog eyeballing as pure appreciation.
Once they had inspected their room for a full three seconds, we all headed to the office.
The registration desk was manned by Anildo Pereira, who could usually be found reading some fantasy novel on his phone when not occupied by his sparse duties. Technically, he was supposed to help out in the dining room if things were dead up front, but I didn’t press the issue. Now, seeing new guests, he hopped to it.
Nellie’s desk was off in a corner of the room, behind a folding screen we had erected. I said, “Okay, then, see you gents later,” and, leaving Nancarrow’s boys with Anildo, I went to check on her. She was banging away at a calculator. Seeing me, she immediately complained, “Glen, we have to do something about this damn electric bill. It’s killing us!”
“Okay, don’t worry about it. I have something more important to tell you. Come take a walk with me.”
We stepped around the divider and past Rushlow and Digweed, who were bent over their paper registration forms, looking as if they had never held a pen before. (We had no computer system.) I gave Nellie a look that plainly said, Note these guys.
Once we were halfway to the lake, I told her the story that Stan and I had cobbled together.
“Nellie, I was hoping I wouldn’t have to burden you with this, but those two men are looking for Stan. We hoped they’d never find him, but it seems as if they know he was here. They’re ex-cons with a grudge. He heard through the grapevine that they might have gotten on his trail. That’s the real reason he headed for the woods. We can’t let on that we even know him, or there could be trouble.”
Nellie’s normal ebullience transmuted to grave concern. She was genuinely worried for Stan. “Ay, seguro. I won’t say a thing. I’ll make sure none of meus compatriotas say anything, either. We know how to hang together, verdade. But won’t these guys recognize you and Sandy?”
“No, neither of us. Never met ’em. So we can help watch Stan’s back and keep him safe.”
“Me, too, then! We can’t let anything happen to Stan—or to the lodge!”
34
Nellie had been wondering how we managed to burn through so many eggs in the dining room. But that mystery would never have come up if Digweed and Rushlow had been our guests earlier. At breakfast the morning after their arrival, they wolfed down a dozen eggs and a pound of bacon between them, along with a stack of blueberry buttermilk pancakes. (Jenise Rezende, our young female chef, had gotten her degree from the Culinary Institute of America and was decidedly overqualified for the job. But she had been forced to return to Centerdale after graduation to care for sick parents and, after their recent deaths, was still deciding what to do with her life, which is how we had nabbed her skills for the lodge.) I was rethinking the wisdom of having the “Hungry Man’s All-You-Can-Eat Breakfast Special” on the menu.
Stuffed at last, they had departed with rifles and packs for a day of “hunting”—that is, a recon of the place. They weren’t scoping out the territory for its suitability as a casino site—that was far beyond their skills—but for its permeability and defensibility. If their boss was going to come here—as he must for our plan to succeed—then he would have to be assured of being able to provide for his personal safety.
I didn’t worry about them encountering Stan by accident. His campsite, though close by, was well off the beaten track, obscured by dense undergrowth, and best accessible by water. He had moored a kayak there beforehand, hidden in the reeds, for a quick exit. And last night at dusk, I had sent Sandralene out in one of the skiffs to alert him to our new arrivals. Watching her pull effortlessly on the oars with her strong arms and broad back, I had sighed. In a more perfect world, I would surely be entitled to a harem. But that night, in bed with Nellie, I forgot all about my whimsical longing for Stan’s woman.
While the two goons were out poking around, I mentally rehearsed the sort of questions they were bound to ask about the business, and my best answers. I had to present the enterprise in the most appealing light to make it look as if we were rubes, and Nancarrow could just barge in and scoop us up for some “generous” multiple of what we had paid—a sales figure in the public records—but still a tiny fraction of what Steve Prynne would soon be offering him. Little did that bastard Nancarrow know that he was going to the wall for twenty million cold.
I left my breakfast in the dining room. Nellie had risen and eaten a couple of hours before me, so eager was she to start the day’s work. I relished both her tender goodbye kiss as I lay abed, and the extra sleep, since I suspected that once things began to heat up, lazing around would be a forgone luxury.
A FedEx truck pulled up. This had to be the stuff Ray had created: two documents essential to our scheme.
I approached the delivery guy, but he wouldn’t turn the two envelopes over to anyone but Ray. Just as well. I ushered him to the room Ray and Vee cohabited. Vee was out somewhere—her Volkswagen was gone—but Ray answered the door. He accepted the envelopes and left an illegible scrawl on the FedEx driver’s computer screen. I followed him inside his room.
Vee’s bed, alongside a nightstand full of books, had a military neatness about it, while Ray’s looked as if an army of feral teenagers had camped there, leaving it full of crumbs and snack wrappers and dirty baseball shirts.
Ray studied the two envelopes intently, then said, “This one is from Uncle Ralph.”
I took it and opened it.
Inside was the perfect, watertight sales agreement for the lodge, vetted by good lawyers and a real estate agent back in the city. Ralph’s formally old-fashioned signature awaited Nancarrow’s to complete the contract. The buyer’s name and selling price had been left blank.
Ray had slit open the second envelope and withdrawn its contents: an unsealed business-size envelope containing a single folded piece of stationery.
The letterhead, on thick, expensive stock, displayed the famous gold-embossed, hand-scripted Prynne name, with its terminal decorative dot. Prynne’s trademark floral motif embellished both the paper and the envelope. The name and address of Prynne’s lawyer headed the salutation, with the lawyer’s signature affirmed underneath by Steve Prynne’s own scrawl.
And the body of the letter offered the owners of Bigelow Junction Motor Lodge twenty million dollars for all rights to the property.
The date on the letter was still several days in the future.
When Nancarrow arrived to buy us out, we would be eager, after a little confusion and hesitation. After all, we were just some Podunk businessmen sitting on an unexceptional property, and the business was losing money. Who wouldn’t be eager to sell under those conditions? Nancarrow would be hooked, steepling his fingers and crooning, “Excellent!” He would consider the deal as good as done, the land already his.
But then, after we had dither
ed for a while, once the date on the letter arrived, we would turn into incorrigible holdouts. Because now we knew what the land was really worth, thanks to Prynne’s newly disclosed offer.
So why would we then take Nancarrow’s twenty-million-dollar matching deal, when he proposed it, without asking more from him for bypassing Prynne’s bid? Because we would let Nancarrow convince us—as Stan and I were confident he would try to do—that only his business savvy could get more from Prynne. That we were small-time duffers who had no negotiating skills and were not operating from a position of strength. We might even screw up the deal entirely, whereas Nancarrow was a genius deal maker and had leverage. He could threaten to build his own casino on the land if Prynne did not come through with more money.
And thus, the deal would wrap up nicely. Nancarrow would assume he had snookered us, getting the truly worthless property at a bargain price. And we would walk away with his twenty million.
I handed the letter back to Ray and said, “Good job. Keep this hidden in a safe place.”
“Yes, Mr. Glen. I will hide it inside the most valuable book I own. I could never lose it then.”
Ray picked up a massive worn paperback with a picture of a baseball batter on the cover: The Bill James Handbook.
“Good choice, Ray. How’s that banking business coming?”
“We now have a very private account that will hold our money safely here and overseas, Mr. Glen. Do you know, I think financial matters are really pretty interesting. If my time were not all taken up with baseball and my disco music, I might have gotten really involved in that field.”
I made a mental note not to invest in the stock market without consulting Ray, should his priorities ever shift.
Outside, I thought of tracking down Nellie to see what she was doing for lunch. But several niggling chores intervened as workers found me. And I had to help one family find their car keys, lost somewhere between the beach and the lodge. So lunch kept getting postponed until about two o’clock, when Sheriff Broadstairs drove up as I stood outside a unit, helping Bethinho Fonseca, our handyman, rehang a door.
The Big Get-Even Page 16
